1584 - Dueling Questions with BA Murry

Foreign. Doctor James Beckett Sports Card Insights Dueling questions with B.A. murray, longtime friend and former colleague and one of the three amigos that have been set up at every national. I've been to everyone, but I haven't set up wide ranging conversation. The poor audio is my fault. I should have switched us to phone instead of Zoom. Thanks sponsors Tops Panini Upper Deck Heritage Auctions, Hugs the Scott Auctions, Mike Stadium Sports Cards, burbank sports cards comc.com and Beckett media Beckett grading, Beckett authentication. So thanks ba and thanks listeners. Here's our conversation. Welcome to the show. We see each other at the nationals but are you going to very many shows? Are you traveling much? I haven't been to any show except the national for six or seven years. Your biggest claim to fame I think now has become you're one of the three amigos that have set up at every national. That's quite the claim to fame as the years keep going. I've been to every one, but I obviously haven't set up but I've been there. You've been to every one of them. I don't remember seeing you the first one, but hey, that's a long time ago, right? No. Gervis and I shared a table at the front and we put the ad in the first price guide. There was that big ad on the back cover for the national. So I was working with Gavin and Mike Burkus and Steve Bruner. I helped promote that in my own way. But a con I really believed in seemed to me. Gavin just said we want to show you for five years or whatever. Six months ago we're going to call our national come home. I believe that's how I decided to go that first time. It was a big deal to get guys from the Midwest or the east coast to go for the first one in la. Now we can hardly get back to the west coast but there was a nucleus of strong collectors in the Los Angeles areas and they did a great job getting it off the ground. A couple years ago Bill Stone brought a picture. It showed us the 82 national picture showed every third national. You were one of the co promoters and it had a picture. We liked the Chicago three. And so that's a picture of actually the first four national promoters are in that picture. They're Gavrilla's in the background like barely showing. They're looking off their. And I had never before a couple years ago. It's freaky when you go to a show now and things are a hundred times what they were 50 years ago. And you were there 60 years ago. You were active in the early 60s. Mail order, mid-50s when I first recognized you could buy cards from. And Sam Rosen was the name I remember 20 years or whatever. Years later I learned he was Woody Gilman's father in law. So that's where his source of help. Sorry to my Darvik. Did you order? Were you just filling in your sets? Because people were not cherry picking superstars in those days. The earliest price list from Sam Rosen and then when he died, they changed the name to the car collection company. I don't have any of those original price listings. But mostly it just says card numbers 1 to 4, 95, whatever price. And then they might say panel extra or whatever. They didn't commit themselves. Card numbers, selling space for a dime or whatever. What was your ordering pattern? Because you've always been a really savvy collector and really understood you. But back in those days, were you just mainly getting Cardinals or were you getting Stan Musial or just the numbers you needed for your sets? The problem was there weren't Stan usual cards in 500 in those years. You didn't know because you're just a kid on the street buying packs. And no. 55, no 54 stand, no. 55 stand, whatever. So it's frustrating. I think by when I first getting the price slides, I learned a little information. Then of course the hobby publications sellers started their own. And that's really where I think the early checklists and the early material became distributed. Learned about things. But what I was buying is things I did buy. 1948 Boeing said $4.80, 10 cents a quarter. You just bought it. 1848 Panini for the full debt. 49 cent was really expensive, right? $24. Which means of course 10 cents a piece across the board. But was Sam Rosen getting that for free? I remember the earliest set I bought, Topps. Redbacks the set, $1.02 a card, $1.50. I think I bought them severally. I bought the redbacks. The blue backs were probably a little bit more. I still buy packs and whatever. I bought my big set in 57 when I bought in spring. If they hit an advanced sale, buy the 57 set. We'll send it to you as they're produced, right? Because they pay less than $10 for the 57 set. And in spring or spring, of course, dad paid everything. Dad is always the guy that did stuff. You're here 18 years old, I never heard of myself. But anyways, we bought 5,152 Goldmans, which seem to be ancient cards. So you were going to your dad and saying, look, I've got a chance to get a complete set. So you're ordering complete sets. So small sets. And then the small sets made me 56. Maybe within 56 or 57, I had accumulated extra 56s. So I wrote back to the car collector company and I said, I've got 600 extra cards to sell. You earned me 1 10th per card. So I'm in Earth now. First class. Mail was 3 cents, so that wasn't too big of a factor. I'm sitting here thinking, okay, 600 kurzhak gets 50 cents out of it. No, I thought, I'll pass. I don't think that's a good deal when I'm sure they just didn't want anything. Well, that may have been what they were getting them for BA they may have been getting them from tops at less than a penny a piece. So to buy yours at less than a penny a piece, they weren't trying to steal them. Probably got as many cards as they needed. My first big mistake, I've told you years ago, was giving away my 54s. The 55s came out. My friend came over and said, oh, the new 55s, I don't need these 54s anymore. He's looking incredulous. I don't know if I gave him everything, but I gave him a lot of stuff. And this is a guy that 20 years later, he walked into Larry Dooley's Houston card shop selling cards. And Larry Paduli asked him where he's from. Harbordell, Illinois. And Larry Cooley knew my name. Being collector in the 50s to the publications back then. Strange coincidence. Well, it was pretty days. I bought from 5763 direct from either the card collectors or Gordon B. Taylor, who started the car comments and the trading card company out of Michigan. I think that was J. Barry. I did some deals with Jay Barry in the mid-70s, in the CD in the mid-70s. He was a regular advertiser. I talked to John here. I was just catching up on the end of the next. I was saying, were you at the national that we read about in the last couple weeks? No, I was at Southern national at national back there. Big room. We were just down front. The old guys, we never saw what's going on. Yu-Gi-Oh I just think you're identified. I am too, as part of the OG the guys that have been around a long time. And it's an advantage. And it's a disadvantage because we just have this knowledge. But you almost have to unlearn the way it used to be because it's different now. Yu-Gi-Oh the brand new orientation towards Pokemon and the brand new open up pack and pull out a thousand dollar card. I'm seeing some items for a million dollars and I'm thinking in five years a million dollar investment gonna be worth 20 bucks. People got the million to spend on. Hey, we're not their customer. But there's apparently a lot of customers. I felt like in the simpler days it wasn't like a lottery. You were just trying to get the cards you needed. If you needed a better card or a tougher card, it was more on supply than on demand. Obviously you'd pay a little bit more for mantle, but not like now where the mantle is worth the whole rest of the set or more off to the 70s that the card shows in the Midwest, anywhere where I toured mostly in the back of my Beckett I had my wallet list. Me too. You go around to Mike Weed or whoever's you hit everybody looking for your list and they come to your table saying hey, looking for the list. You're filling in the sets. Sure you're looking for valuable cards if you can get a good deal on valuable cards. But I was fortunate that by the mid seventh I had complete sets from at least 54, 55 to was a kid. I quit after 63. You get too old when you're a teenager 15, 16 years old. In the early 60s card business was kids up, right. You had other concerns, your high school days and later on. And I consider myself a typical boomer who started off Clapton in the 50s and by early 60s you're in high school, going on to other pursuits. And maybe you go in the service or maybe you go to College in early 70s, 20, 25 years old. Maybe you're settled a little bit. That's where we call the Delta. I think started when the John Ramirez went to the the first car show in 1970. When they got sat around and the other little areas started populating. St. Louis at its group in Indianapolis and Cincinnati and Chicago and I know east and west coast, they all did the same thing. So we were the 20 something guys mostly at that time. Me too. Maybe some older people, the warden Gammons and the old guys that looked at us as young whippersnappers. But we're finished mostly 48. That was the year that the boomers would have known 48 to early 60s and so on. And 70 I felt advanced so I could work on Some older stuff or I never really got into pre World war stuff. I was really not interested greatly in that. I bought E206s for 35 cents, right? I'm the card collector's company and I bought my first run of Connie Max from the card collectors company. Buck 75 a piece. Expensive cards. It sounds like you did more buying than I did. During the 60s and 70s, I did a lot more trading. I felt like. Were you a trader as much as a buck? Local kids around before 1960, the 10 or 12 or 15 year old, whatever kids we were still traded and so on. But I was about the last local guy who was still into cards by eighth grade. High school, first couple of years I didn't have any vocal links probably until the CD came along. And that Davis was the obvious thing. And then you do. The travel era started in 73 when I first went to St. Louis for the monthly group get together. You remember little incidents. I was gonna deal with this guy or I was doing this or I wasn't set or I sold the 1956 for 90 bucks and I was thrilled to sell it. You know, it was a really nice 90 bucks. Hoxley became a St. Louis promoter. Back in the days, he was a. It was like his first show. He walked in and sat down there, look at the 56. He bought the set, gave me nine bucks. And he sat there and looked at every single car one at a time. Okay, this is okay, this is okay. But you were serious. My sense is that you like me. I was probably the most serious collector in my neighborhood growing up. And then when you hit the national hobby as it was emerging as we were getting out of college or able to have some spending money, then we kept that seriousness. I think I have the collecting gene. I love to collect things. Besides that, I figured I'm an organizer. Me too. An organizer. You're a stat guide. I was an accountant. And as a kid you collected other stuff. I didn't collect stamps very much, but I collected coins, pennies, dimes, nickels and other kinds of stuff that I've forgotten about. But you organize it and you display it. But the cards, obviously, because you're following your team, you're following baseball. And you were a pirate guy in the early days. Close enough to probably hear the games on the radio. Being the games was not happening, right. You never saw games. And once or twice a year in the late 50s, they started showing more games. But I heard Harry Carey and Jack Buck and Joe Garrigio were Carl just at the same Time for a while and finally seeing a picture of Harry Cary a few years. It doesn't look like I expect him to look. Sounds like this, you know, it's a strange looking guy but so the obvious thing of 54 first decks of cards. I'm 7 years old and, and I don't remember this exactly but early 54 stand he's at five home runs in a double header. A double header like May they have scheduled a double header two weeks after the season opened. And easy to hit five home runs and a double headed Cards at that point probably were just coming out. But it was obvious in the family. My grandfather, I visit them and listen to Cardinal games and so you pick that up. I don't know if at home we listen to them until I zeroed in on that. Finally realized six or seven years old I could turn the radio on and heard a ball game so. And usable is the obvious car to collect. Now Clemente came up in 55. How early did you recognize that Clemente was your guy? At some point my dad took me to Forbes Field back in the day and Khomeini just had a Fleer It was probably 57, 58, 59 somewhere in there where we went to some games. And he just was amazing fun to watch, played with a lot of exuberance and seemed whenever we needed a clutch hit, he was the guy that did it. But again it still wasn't a superstar orientation for me as much as I just love baseball. Did you ever do any of the buying trips like I did back in the 70s? Because if you did, were you looking for certain things? Because you can say you're looking for pre 1964 cards or whatever, but whatever they walk up with, you have a chance to either buy it or not buy it. But I was really delighted when I was getting things that I needed over the years after I did it. For a while you're just hoping to get some good stuff. But do you have that same sentiment? You know, in the mid-70s or whatever I did the shows, I did St. Louis or whatever and the Midwest circuit, which is the same distance to Cincinnati or Kansas City for driving Chicago. My first buying trip, 1980 after the first Beckett annual guide came out, which really established a comfort level I believe for non collectors. Say we've got grandpa's collection. It lists the books, this stuff. Yu-Gi-Oh they're legitimate. So Paul Martin and I, I went on a two week buying trip to North Carolina and worked our way back. We make 10 or 11 stops and people came around to interview us three times. They'd see our ad in the paper thing. We'll be at the Holiday one-of-one on Friday, Saturday, whatever, and we call. So we did these interviews, some newspaper articles, and there's pictures of us. I think I had those out. The first annual guide. We would flash the book and say we're paying 80% of these prices on the guy. And we were turning down mid-70s stuff. Right. In fact, the discussion about what is the dividing line between modern cars and vintage. Back when the buying trip days for me, it was 63 and before. Because if somebody came in with 65s, you'd say, of course, this is 1975. You'd say, it's only 10 years old, not a big deal. But then it moved up to like 73. 73 because that's the last series. Then it moved up to 79 or 80 because then you flir and Donruss Some people move it up to 89 to pick up Upper Deck. But deep down, if you're of a certain age, which we are, Upper Deck are not vintage and Donruss and Fleer are not vintage. Junk wax should not be vintage. But 63 and back is what got our juices flowing. Now you got a chance at some good cards, some tougher cards. Because like I've frequently said, it was way more hobby in those days of supply more than men. You were looking for the tougher cards. Yu-Gi-Oh 63 was my last regular year of collecting. I bought the set and I got extra cards in 64. I think I had the cards. I got just packs. The 64 Beatles. That changed the dynamic that took you away from sports. It didn't take me away from sports, but my time spent on the cards. I was 17 and 64, so that was old for a kid collector per se. Those little local kids were collecting and I was almost embarrassed to go to the grocery store and buy some packs of cards. So I disappeared through my college years and I was in the service until 72. 73, which was the right timing for me to break, but perfect time to come back too. Yu-Gi-Oh So I felt as early getting back in the first St. Louis groups. We spent the first year just doing the local events and that's when the east and west coast guys came in. They flew into standings and biggies across from the airport. It was a big turnout there and I remember huge amount of walking stuff for sale. Full sets, 51 Bowmans, 52 Bowmans, 48. Lee. Yu-Gi-Oh just we had that in St. Louis for about a decade where one of them had big shows People would bring in stuff. We had one show that stayed open till 3:00am because it was scheduled to stay open until 9:00 clock. And some lady shows up with her goddess and delongs and stuff at 8:30 and watch the option tomorrow. One of these or twos is time and we agreed to that. So sitting there at 2:30 in the morning, I'm bidding against one-of-one Varner for a Lou Gehri Tom Guard. Actually there were two of them available and I went over and I think he got the other one. So if you're paying attention, you could make a deal. You think the hobby is an endurance sport. You just got to outlast the other guys. The shows were open till 9 o'. Clock. A lot of those shows, the room was full until they hushed everybody out. Then they had an auction. It's nine o', clock, you have an auction. But St. Louis would have continuing auctions in these days. Somebody who worked for the stadium would walk in with 300 autograph baseballs going back to 1930 something and they'd auction them off one at a time. And Clinton Dynasty and Beck's like, oh, we don't need that one. Put on the next one. Okay, five bucks for that one. Okay, we'll wait for the 42 Yankees and then. Yu-Gi-Oh you can't repeat that stuff. You.